


Make It Last All Year

by counterheist



Series: cubicle gods [3]
Category: Yuri!!! on Ice (Anime)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Office, Family Feels, Katsuki Yuuri's Terrible Self-Doubt, M/M, Synergizing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-24
Updated: 2017-05-24
Packaged: 2018-11-04 08:21:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,012
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10987113
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/counterheist/pseuds/counterheist
Summary: “I’m synergizing,” Viktor explains gleefully one day when Celestino walks by Yuuri’s cubicle to see Viktor carefully kneading Yuuri’s shoulders. Yuuri’s eyes are closed, and if Viktor wasn't sure he’d fallen asleep before he is now. He doesn't stop pressing his thumbs into Yuuri’s tense muscles.Celestino keeps walking.A third fic about cubicles, and how the people who work in them don’t do much work in them.





	Make It Last All Year

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks again to tom for betaing.

“Is it inappropriate to add me to your family registry before I’ve met your parents, or will they appreciate my thoughtfulness?” Viktor asks one spring afternoon in late April. They are taking it slow, this thing they have where Viktor says they’re dating at the very _least_ , where Yuuri doesn’t even know. This is Viktor’s idea of slow, Yuuri has realized over the last four months. He has probably been sitting on this question for the entire week.

It’s Wednesday, so, that’s a new record.

“Yes,” Yuuri says, tapping at the surface of his desk with the end of his mechanical pencil. “It would be very rude.”

“We’ll wait then,” Viktor nods in agreement, strokes the side of Yuuri’s face, and then saunters away.

He’s always doing things like that: the unreasonable questions, the inappropriate touching in the workplace, the sauntering. Yuuri’s learned it's not on purpose - not all of it, anyway, he’s mostly sure the sauntering is completely on purpose - but it still makes him nervous. Because, well, part of him believes that Viktor is going to stay. But most of him, 99.99%, relentlessly squashes that little hopeful part up and sets it on fire in a dumpster. That little part’s hopeful screams sound a lot like “you’re right” and “but when he looks at us he-”. 99.99% of Yuuri kicks the dumpster lid shut and marches back to work.

Viktor might be extremely, inexplicably attracted to Yuuri, but Occam’s Razor holds that it has to be something else. There must be a simpler solution. He's playing a game. He's conducting an experiment on the blood pressure of 18-34 year old Japanese males. He's got a weird tie kink, and Yuuri really did it for him at that Christmas party. Anyone who had done the same embarrassing thing would have gotten the same perplexing result.

Yuuri isn’t special.

* * *

Viktor meets Yuuri’s parents during Golden Week. He refrains from immediately asking to become their son. Yuuri doesn’t know whether he is disappointed by this or not.

* * *

The calendar rolls into early July and Viktor is still in Japan, in Fukuoka, on the fifteenth floor of Yuuri’s building, none of which are places he’s meant to be. None of which are places that even deserve him, probably. The fifteenth floor only has one kitchenette, and it doesn’t even have a dishwasher. Viktor has to hand wash his mugs in the sink on the fifteenth floor like some common cubicle drone. No cubicle deserves Viktor Nikiforov - Yuuri knows his cubicle doesn’t, even though that’s where Viktor tends to end up when left to his own devices.

“Lunch was very boring without you today,” Viktor says, hip balanced up on the edge of Yuuri’s desk. Yuuri’s desk is not very tall, but Viktor is. He’s leaning over the remains of Yuuri’s convenience store bento with a judgmental look on his face.

“The Mister Donut project is on a tight schedule,” Yuuri says, exasperated and frustrated and angry with himself. “I’ve allowed too many delays as it is.”

“I could have brought something back for you.”

But then he would have wanted to eat with Yuuri, and Yuuri would have had to watch him eat and also try not to eat the way he normally does, which is quickly and appreciatively and embarrassingly. Appearing normal around Viktor takes a lot of effort for Yuuri.

“I’m fine,” Yuuri says. He fidgets with his pen and wishes Viktor would stay forever and leave immediately.

“Dinner tonight, though?” Viktor asks. “Do you still have time to have dinner with me?”

Yuuri doesn’t. He really doesn’t. Celestino’s going to fire him if he doesn’t get this proposal finished, he knows it. The decision meeting is in three weeks and Celestino usually likes a _week_ for pre-reads and Yuuri doesn’t have time for anything and he’s taking vacation soon anyway and he needs everything to be finished before he goes.

He takes a deep breath. “I…”

“I’ll bring something back,” Viktor says quickly, standing, “for both of us. I like watching you work anyway. I could do it all night.”

Yuuri sends an invocation to the supply closet where some of the lesser cubicle gods live. He does not think about the work he could do with Viktor watching all night. (Yes he does.)

Viktor strides off, either to get back to the job he’s paid for or to pre-order takeout six or seven hours too early.

“Yuuri?”

Yuuri is already looking in the direction of the hallway. He never stopped after Viktor left. But it takes him a moment to pull his thoughts back in from where they’ve fled, scattered, to the corners of his awareness. When he does, he sees Sara Crispino standing in front of him wearing a sharp blazer and skirt set. She has a neat leather folio under her left arm and a mess of manila interoffice mail envelopes pressed to her chest.

This is the fastest she’s ever followed up on Viktor’s behavior after he’s said something _not strictly_ _professional_ to Yuuri at work. Yuuri is a little impressed. Also a little afraid.

“Yes?” he says more than a beat too late.

Sara’s eyes flick over to Viktor’s office and then back to Yuuri. He sets down his pen and resists adjusting his shirt collar. “Don’t forget to turn in your vacation request for next week,” she says. “That’s all. You’re going back to Hasetsu, that’s right?”

He is, but he doesn’t know how Sara knows that or even how Sara knew to remind him. He flushes. Of course he would almost forget to code his absence. He can’t even take vacation days correctly anymore, he’s too. Too… he doesn’t know. Whatever Yuuri is he’s so much of it he can’t even describe it. Now he really does bring a hand up to the back of his neck to make sure his collar hasn’t flipped itself up. It’s more of a concern these days than it used to be, since Viktor likes wandering by to give Yuuri little neck massages sometimes during the day.

Sara can never know about the neck massages.

Yuuri’s collar is exactly where it’s been since he put his shirt on this morning.

The marks underneath it itch, a little.

“I am,” he says. “Ah, my family is usually very busy over holiday weekends, so sometimes I take the bus down to help.” And this year there’s Viktor, who was in raptures over Hasetsu when he came to visit with Yuuri during Golden Week. Viktor, who spent hours on the beach. Yuuri can imagine what Viktor will be like now that the beach will be warm enough to visit without a jacket. He tries not to indulge in those imaginings when Sara is right there, being a Human Resources Professional. Yuuri is also a professional, but only at lying to the public. Also himself.

“Well,” she smiles, “I hope the two of you have fun.”

She leaves and realization sets in. Yuuri knows how she knew about his vacation. And it’s embarrassing how warm that makes his cheeks and a place inside his chest. He spins his chair to face away from the hallway and twirls his pen in his fingers and doesn’t get any work done for a while.

* * *

Yuuri’s desk is the first place people go to find Viktor when they notice the light in his office is off. This is because Viktor wastes a lot of time in Yuuri’s cubicle. It is also because he fidgets enough to make the motion-detecting automatic light an extremely accurate indicator of whether he’s at his desk or not. For all that Viktor likes to tout his dedication to surprises, he has his own predictability.

He sits on the spare swivel chair Yuuri has and pouts and swivels and makes an obvious remark of himself. Yuuri can’t focus on anything else, at first. It takes him weeks to learn how to breathe easily with Viktor sitting behind him, or next to him. It takes him months to learn how to type the things he needs to type every time Viktor appears in his cubicle with no jacket and a wide smile. But Yuuri does learn, somehow, impossibly.

Over time being near Viktor becomes something natural. Yuuri selfishly doesn’t want to give it up, even if it has to be a statistical anomaly. Viktor can’t really… he just can’t.

All Yuuri can do is hold on to him until he realizes that.

“I’m sure it would be easier to finish your project updates if you had a drafting table,” Yuuri says lowly into the summer heat he wishes he could spread himself out beneath. The A/C on the twelfth through sixteenth floors has been broken since the morning, and it’s taking all of Yuuri’s self control to not strip down and lie in front of one of the handful of fans building maintenance brought up to assist in the meantime. Phichit spent the morning sending Yuuri photos of him and Leo on the fourteenth floor, lounging around the copy room in their undershirts and socks, but Yuuri could never. Not ever. Not sober. “The last time I checked,” Yuuri continues, “You even have one in your office.”

“I’m thinking,” Viktor says to defend himself. He’s still wearing his neat button-down and vest. The only indication Yuuri has the heat is affecting Viktor at all is the light sheen of sweat on his forehead. His usually well-styled hair hangs limply against the side of his face. “Designs don’t come from nowhere, Yuuri, they have to be inspired.”

“Right.”

“They do!” Viktor exclaims, wheeling his chair as close as he can until the arm rest makes it impossible to place himself any closer to Yuuri. “I’m always inspired when I visit you,” he says. “Therefore I am always working when I visit you.” Yuuri doesn’t know what to do with that.

“Viktor…”

“You're right, we should keep the accents on the Moir gallery blue, but the glass clear! Can't believe I didn't think of it myself.”

Viktor lays his head on Yuuri’s shoulder. His reach is awkward because of their chairs and Yuuri knows his head has to be at an odd angle. Yuuri is tempted to tell him to stop it for his own sake, or because it’s too hot in the office already and Viktor’s body heat makes that so much worse, but.

Eventually Yuuri is able to return to the focus group data he’d been analyzing before. The steady hum from the fans is relaxing in its own way.

* * *

“I’m synergizing,” Viktor explains gleefully one day when Celestino walks by Yuuri’s cubicle to see Viktor carefully kneading Yuuri’s shoulders. Yuuri’s eyes are closed, and if Viktor wasn't sure he’d fallen asleep before he is now. He doesn't stop pressing his thumbs into Yuuri’s tense muscles.

Celestino keeps walking.

* * *

The final design for the Moir gallery gets displayed in the small lobby by the elevator bank on the fifteenth floor. The art department has a reception to unveil it, complete with very small plates of appetizers and delicate flutes of free champagne. The denizens of the fifteenth floor slip out of their cubicles one by one to wait on the fringes of the reception – full of people from floors eighteen and up – for their chance to snag some free refreshments.

Yuuri is the last of them to leave his desk to come see, even though he knows there’s a reason the reception is happening on the Marketing floor and not the Design floor, and that reason’s reasons have a lot to do with him. He steps carefully through the crowd, nodding to the people he knows, ducking quickly past the CEO so she can’t ask him how his family is doing again. The CEO shouldn’t even know Yuuri’s name. He’s only given presentations in front of her three, maybe four times over the course of his entire career. It’s not like he’s important to ICECO.

He avoids all conversation. He wants to see the mock-up and the designs.

Viktor spent the better part of six months wandering in and out of Yuuri’s cubicle, slipping sketches under his nose and offhandedly asking if Yuuri liked them. And then suddenly, the week before the deadline and two weeks before the reception, he stopped. He kept the shades pulled down over his office windows. He changed the sign on his door from YUURI COME VISIT ME I’M BORED to YUURI DON’T YOU HAVE YOUR OWN WORK TO DO?

Yuuri hasn’t seen the final plans yet.

Phichit assures him that doesn’t mean Viktor’s breaking up with him, and Yuuri knows Viktor’s not going to break up with him (yet), but still. But. It can’t be that Viktor is nervous about Yuuri seeing his work. He has to know Yuuri loves his designs, all of them, even the ones the Architectural Review called “eccentric” or “strange” or “phallic”.

_how wld he kno that u havnt shown him the viktor drawer_ , Phichit texts when Yuuri sends him his very real and legitimate concerns. He’s waiting in a line he thinks has formed in front of the designs, but might also be in front of the drinks table. He can’t tell yet. He’s too far from the front. And does it matter, really? Yuuri could use a drink. Maybe if he gets drunk at work again Viktor will let him give him another lap dance.

_!!!!!!_ _༼ ༎_ _ຶ_ _෴_ _༎_ _ຶ_ _༽_ _never_ , Yuuri writes back. Someone jostles his elbow. He pulls his arms in close to his body and wishes he had just ignored Viktor’s signs and barged into his office anyway. He doesn’t want to be here, but he needs to know what Viktor’s created this time, how it falls against all the other things Viktor’s ever made. Only then can he think about what that means – if it’s better, or if it’s worse.

_save me a canape_ , Phichit sends.

Yuuri doesn’t write back because he’s reached the front of the line, and it was the line for the designs after all. Viktor’s there, wearing one of his nicer suits and a pale blue tie. He looks up when Yuuri gets within a meter of him. The tips of his ears go pink. He keeps talking to someone who is paid a lot more than Yuuri is. All the people here are so important it makes Yuuri’s spine itch. He turns his focus instead to the design.

It’s set up on three large poster boards behind Viktor, with a small 1/32 scale model on a table at chest height. The gallery is going to be swooping steel, and glass, and light. Its smooth curves look like they’ve pushed themselves out of the ground beneath them. Like they’ll be grown, more than constructed.

It’s beautiful.

It’s. Blue.

One of the board members Viktor had been lightly chatting with says something about how the windows of the gallery, in particular, are so stylish. How Viktor’s designs are always so modern and beautiful. Yuuri looks at the windows on the model. The frames are metallic, blue. They’re familiar.

Yuuri is wearing that blue.

At first he thinks, oh. Oh. That’s my – our – his – tie. Viktor put the tie into his design. It reminds him of the reason why Viktor came to Japan at all, and how Yuuri is only that person after two bottles of cheap champagne and intense personal heartbreak. It makes him think that Viktor spent six months crafting a seven billion yen project out of a vision of Yuuri that Yuuri will never be able to live up to.

But then he realizes, no. No. The shade isn’t quite right.

Yuuri is wearing that blue, but cubicle gods above, those are his glasses.

* * *

Partway through the reception Yuuri does ignore Viktor’s sign.

When Viktor finds him, it doesn’t seem like he minds.

* * *

Yuuri finds out his mother and Viktor are friends on Facebook on a Friday morning. He’s lying in bed at the time, waiting for the sun to stop being so bright in his eyes. Another solution to the problem would be to get up – it would be the responsible thing to do, considering it’s a work day – but Yuuri can’t find the strength to swing his legs over onto the floor quite yet. Instead he shields his eyes with his phone and scrolls listlessly through updates and ads.

To Phichit’s extreme judgment, Yuuri doesn’t spend much time on social media. He has a twitter now! And an Instagram. He sends stickers to his sister on LINE. But Yuuri can easily go a week without checking any of these things and this time it’s been two. He’s scrolling through his feed, skipping over shared news articles he’s already read, when he sees it.

_Viktor Nikiforov commented on this post._

This post being a picture of a dumpling Yuuri’s mother made in the shape of a rabbit.

_Delicious!_ Viktor has written. _Please teach me next weekend. I will make them for Yuuri! <3_

The first, easy, unfiltered thought Yuuri has is that Viktor’s Japanese writing skills have really improved since he first arrived in Japan.

And then the rest of it catches up to him. Yuuri’s phone falls, hitting him in the face, when he realizes what it means: his mother and Viktor are Facebook friends. Viktor talks to Yuuri’s mother. Yuuri’s mother, who has listened to Yuuri’s reasons for working at ICECO. Yuuri’s mother, who bought Yuuri a poster of the Bird’s Nest because she thought Viktor had designed it. Yuuri’s mother, who has begun to scan Yuuri’s naked baby photos and upload them to the internet despite his desperate protests.

_viktor tklas2 my mOM,_ Yuuri types. ゞ◎Д◎ヾ

“How did you not know that?” Phichit shouts back at him. He bangs on Yuuri’s door and not his wall because he is already up and making breakfast. Phichit runs on sunshine and Instagram likes. Yuuri runs on darkness and MSG. Together they make rent. “She gives him recipes on Pinterest.”

Yuuri realizes the whining sound is coming from deep inside him around the same time his phone tells him his mother has liked a picture Viktor took of the back of Yuuri’s head at work. _A man who can do both_ , Viktor has added in the caption field. Yuuri doesn’t get it. All he’s doing in the picture is sleeping. He’s not doing two things. He’s definitely not working.

Both Christophe Giacometti and Sara Crispino have liked the post. Yuuri doesn’t understand social media at all.

* * *

Fukuoka is an hour and change away from Hasetsu, but Yuuri still doesn’t visit home as often as he should. Sometimes he finds excuses – there are projects that need finishing more than Yuuri needs a weekend, he promised Phichit he would help clean the apartment – but most times he just acknowledges to himself silently that it’s not going to happen. It feels strange to go home without a reason – a birthday, or a holiday, or a request from his parents. It feels like he should have something more to show of himself.

So Yuuri doesn’t go home as often as he should and reflecting on this makes him go home even less frequently. It spirals in on itself, and he misses two weeks of stickers with his sister and his Sunday calls with his mother and forgets to reply to the chain emails his father forwards to him.

This doesn’t really change post-Viktor.

Yuuri doesn’t voluntarily drag himself to his childhood home any more frequently than he used to.

But after Golden Week, Viktor is the one who drags him.

* * *

Marine Day is celebrated on the third Monday in July. Yuuri submits his vacation request for the Thursday and Friday before it two days after Sara reminds him. He does it all electronically because the entire HR Department now gives him a knowing _look_ whenever they see him in the halls. He wishes he knew what they know.

He has a strong feeling at least some of them know about the neck massages.

His vacation request is approved immediately.

Mari offers to pick them up from the train station, but Yuuri tells her not to bother. She has so much to do in the lead up to a holiday weekend that there’s no point in her wasting time on him. Instead they take a cab from the station. Viktor spends the entire trip chatting with the driver about dogs and air conditioning. He sits in the center seat even though no one does that if they don’t have to, and leaves his hand on Yuuri’s thigh. On Viktor’s other side Makkachin is kind enough to look out the window the whole time.

“I saw your pictures, Vicchan,” his mother gushes when they step into the inn. She dashes over to the entryway and holds Viktor by the elbows. “Your gallery is so beautiful! Where did you get the idea for it?”

Yuuri takes off his shoes and looks no one in the eye.

* * *

On Saturday night, after the customers have gone to bed, Yuuri sits at a low table in the family’s private quarters with his father. Mari is out. Makkachin is sleeping on a pile of pillows in the corner of the room. Viktor disappeared into the kitchen with Yuuri’s mother, and Yuuri hasn’t seen either of them since. He heard them say something about bentos and rabbits over dinner. As long as it has nothing to do with baby pictures Yuuri sees no reason to stop it.

“Your Viktor,” Yuuri’s father starts out of nowhere, a deceptively serene expression on his face, “is a nice boy.”

Yuuri thinks so too. This is still not a conversation he is prepared for or wants to have.

“Mom talks to him,” Yuuri says after a lengthy pause. “Online.”

“Hmm.”

The television in the corner of the room is playing a taped Sagan Tosu match on mute. Yuuri wishes he could put his life on mute, sometimes. Like now.

“At first I didn’t think he would be a nice boy,” his father says, “he’s very flashy. But Hiroko wanted to give him a chance and she was right. Any man smart enough to want to immediately marry my son is a man worth knowing. I’m proud to have Vicchan in the family.”

What.

“I thought perhaps when you visited in May and didn’t talk about your marriage you were ashamed, or he had said something to you to make you embarrassed. But when I saw the way he looked at you it reminded me of a trip your mother and I took the summer before Mari was born.”

What.

“Mari had to explain to me later that you hadn’t gotten married after all. I have to admit I was relieved. I want to be there for the ceremony, for my only son.” He reaches out and places a steady hand over Yuuri’s shaking one.

“W-what do you mean,” Yuuri coughs, “ _marriage_.”

He doesn’t understand and he doesn’t want to understand, but when his father starts chuckling and talking about a phone call he received very late at night two Decembers ago the cold trickle of memory begins to slip down Yuuri’s spine.

What happened at the party itself is still lost to him, but he can see himself – drunk and disheveled – slumping in the elevator because it took too much coordination to stand. He can see himself pulling out his phone and taking the entire trip to the fifteenth floor to figure out how to unlock it. Opening his most frequent contacts. Pressing call.

He remembers opening with “Dad I. Dad. _Dad_. I jus’ got _married!_ ”

* * *

Later that night Yuuri sneaks into the banquet room his parents converted into a guest room for Viktor. He nudges himself a space in between Makkachin and Viktor, who blinks slowly awake at Yuuri as though he can’t quite believe any of this is happening.

“No,” Yuuri whispers when Viktor opens his mouth to speak. “Shhh.”

He tangles his legs up with Viktor’s and holds on tight.

**Author's Note:**

> I was serious about tie married.
> 
> I was also serious about Yuuri calling his parents after leaving the party.
> 
> I am a very serious individual.


End file.
